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Page, Don N.
Oral history interview with Don Page, 1988 May 18.
Don Page discusses his parental background and missionary work of parents; childhood in Alaska; early interest in mathematics; early reading; influence of an article by William Fowler on the origin of the elements; early thoughts about cosmology; college experience at William Jewell College in Missouri; National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) summer institute in space physics; early interest in black holes; influence of Kip Thorne at California Institute of Technology (Caltech); interaction with Bill Press, Saul Teukolsky, and Richard Feynman at Caltech; superradiant scattering from black holes; meeting and working with Stephen Hawking; work on instantons; postdoc with Hawking; work on black hole thermodynamics; work on the second law of thermodynamics and the arrow of time; Hawking and Hartle's no boundary proposal for quantum cosmology; freedom of God in setting up the universe; reconciliation of religion and physics; possible universes; interpretation of quantum mechanics; interest of God in universes with life; meaning of the Bible and man's relationship to God; question of whether the universe has a purpose; initial attitude toward the horizon problem; importance of Penrose's "entropy problem"; inflation and the entropy problem; initial attitude toward the inflationary universe model; current attitude toward inflation; probability of inflation; reasons why inflationary universe model has been so influential; attitude toward the flatness problem; the anthropic principle; relative concern over the horizon problem and the flatness problem; visual images in cosmology; ideal design for the universe.
(1948- ): Ph.D. in physics and astronomy, California Institute of Technology (1976); worked with Stephen Hawking at the University of Cambridge (1976-1979); professor of physics at Pennsylvania State University. Research interests include the thermodynamics of black holes, quantum gravity, and studies of the quantum state of the universe.
Feynman, Richard P. (Richard Phillips), 1918-1988
Fowler, William A.
Hartle, J. B. (James B.)
Hawking, Stephen, 1942-2018-
Page, Don N.
Penrose, Roger
Press, William H.
Teukolsky, Saul A. (Saul Arno), 1947-
Thorne, Kip S.
California Institute of Technology
United States. National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
Anthropic principle.
Black holes (Astronomy)
Cosmology
Entropy.
Inflationary universe.
Quantum theory
Thermodynamics.
Interviews. aat
Oral histories. aat
Transcripts. aat
Lightman, Alan P., 1948-, interviewer.
AIP-ICOS
American Institute of Physics. Niels Bohr Library & Archives. One Physics Ellipse, College Park, MD 20740, USA
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